From: Mike '/m' 


http://www.perens.com/SCO/SCOSlideShow.html

===
Bruce Perens, Perens LLC  With help from Linus
Torvalds and the Open Source community.

You may re-publish this material. You may excerpt it, reformat it and
translate it as necessary for your presentation. You may not edit it to
deliberately misrepresent my opinion.

An SCO presentation shown in Las Vegas on August 18th alleged infringement
by the Linux developers. The presentation, in Microsoft PowerPoint format
is here, in PDF (Adobe Acrobat) at this site (donated to help me cope with
the web traffic), and a conversion of the presentation that can be viewed
using a web browser is here .

SCO released the presentation to Bob McMillan, a reporter for IDG News
Service, without any non-disclosure terms. Bob asked me to comment upon it.
here's his story.
I will start with SCO's demonstrations regarding "copied"
software. It is likely that SCO would present the very best examples that
they have of "copied" code in their slide show. But I was easily
able to determine that of the two examples, one isn't SCO's property at
all, and the other is used in Linux under a valid license. If this is the
best SCO has to offer, they will lose.

Slide 15 shows purports to show "Obfuscated Copying" from Unix
System V into Linux. SCO further obfuscated the code on this slide by
switching it to a Greek font, but that was easily undone. It's entertaining
that the SCO folks had no clue that the font-change could be so easily
reversed. I'm glad they don't work on my computer security :-)

The code shown in this slide implements the Berkeley Packet Filter,
internet firewall software often abbreviated as "BPF". SCO
doesn't own BPF. It was created at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory with
funding from the U.S. Government, and is itself derived from an older
version called "enet", developed by Stanford and Carnegie-Mellon
Universities. BPF was first deployed on the 4.3 BSD system produced by the
University of California at Berkeley. SCO later copied the software into
Unix System V.

The BPF source code is here on the Lab's web site. A paper on its design,
published in 1993, is here

BPF is under the BSD license. That license allowed SCO to legally copy the
code into Unix System V in 1996, but since SCO doesn't own the code, they
have no right to prevent others from using it. ...
===

(lots of good links in the article)

 /m

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